As a plaintively dour postcard wedged into the frame of her mirror suggests, since it doesn't look like anywhere they expect strangers to come for fun, Kasha, the woman who cuts my hair, is from Glubczyce. I know this is neither a country nor a capital, and from her accent would guess something Romanian, but it turns out to be a small city in Poland.  

"What part of Poland?", I ask, setting myself up to show off.  

"South", she says, frowning at my right ear so intently that I begin wondering whether I left something in it.  

"So, near Slovakia?" Surely among patrons of a Concord Avenue hair salon I am unusual in knowing what countries border Poland to the south at all, never mind being able to correctly guess which one is closest to her hometown.  

"Yes", she agrees quickly, putting a crisp end to the conversation.  

When I look it up later I discover that Glubczyce is on the border with the Czech Republic, not Slovakia. It's certainly nearer to Slovakia than it is to, say, Mauritius, but I don't think that's what she meant.  

Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar and south of the Seychelles. Its capital is Port Louis. I say this silently to myself while Kasha makes my hair look surprisingly good in peace. Being able to make someone's hair look surprisingly good is an international skill. Knowing the names for things you've never seen is sleep-timer magic for circus librarians.

The flowers fill a good-size room, rows upon rows of display cases that for the most part contain what look like entirely ordinary plants. If you entered unknowing, you would wonder first how they are preserved, and perhaps second how they were cleaned so thoroughly in preparation. If you don't know that the flowers are glass, the exhibition is inscrutably mundane. If you do, it is even harder to comprehend.  

But the flowers date from an age in which technology was still a source of inspiring possibilities, not incrementally more craven shortcuts. A Harvard botany professor, dissatisfied with his materials, commissioned a German glassmaker and eventually his son to spend 50 years making meticulous glass models of 847 species of plants and their magnified entrails. Not only have we probably lost this skill, we have probably also lost the will. As usual, with our tools for studying our world we end up revealing ourselves.

I wanted a race to have a sense of community in effort. There are other runners out when I'm just running, but we are each on our own courses. It seems appealing to occasionally be with a large group of other people all on the same course, maybe in the same way that it's reassuring to genuinely like Alanis Morissette.  

But there weren't really enough people for that at Fresh Pond this morning. Five guys started in front of me and were out of my sight within the first minute. Soon after another one steamed past me fast enough that I assume he was late reaching the starting line. One more passed me at about the mile mark and stayed a turn ahead for the rest of the race; only one of the people behind me ever got close enough for me to see him. So I ended up running by myself, after all, trying to manufacture my own sense of collectivity out of abstraction.  

The other thing I was looking forward to, and probably the reason why I have put off racing against temptation, is the magical adrenaline effect that would spur me to otherwise unreachable speeds. But I felt no faster, and at the line the clock confirmed my sensation. No magic. But then, if I were counting on magic, I wouldn't be running.

Watching Charlie Kaufman movies I have the invigorating suspense of knowing I can't predict what will happen next, but the draining realization that I am following a mystery that shallows rather than deepens, and the ultimate disappointment of having tried to enjoy getting lost on the way to somewhere I wouldn't have chosen to go.  

Watching I ♥ Huckabee's I was in astonished rapture throughout, half-convinced that I had to be dreaming a movie that jumped so unerringly in directions that no physics outside my own head could explain.

I am disproportionately thrilled every time Fiona comes up in Party Shuffle on my iPod. I could listen to her records any time, obviously, but there's something much more pleasing about imagining that there's a universe in which her songs still just crop up in the environment of their own accord. Arguably my iTunes catalog is exactly an ongoing exercise in refining the current music-probability universe in which I wish I were living.

I woke up this morning enraged with myself that I couldn't remember the capital of Zambia. It's Lusaka. In my dream, I knew all the others. Or possibly I was awake. If Praia is the capital of Cape Verde, I was awake.

This is an experiment with unknown goals.